


obeisance

by toromeo (ald0us)



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Fem!Jonathan, Imogen is a dom AND a top, Multi, Victor is a jealous bitch, like a character study but....horny, this is literally what it says on the tin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 08:41:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18688018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ald0us/pseuds/toromeo
Summary: Wanting to please Imogen Herondale is a bad habit, one Victor hasn’t quite been able to kick.





	obeisance

**Author's Note:**

> If you clicked on this just to see if I was serious or not, you're valid. Also yes, I was serious. Enjoy?

It had been a long time since Victor Aldertree had mastered the art of giving a status report while undressing. The worst news first, the way Imogen liked it, while taking off his tie and folding it over the back of a chair. Undoing his cufflinks and taking off his watch, laying out their options as he unbuttoned his shirt. Pulling off his suitcoat and folding that, then his shirt, segueing neatly to the better half of the report. Slipping off his dress shoes and peeling off his socks. Undoing his belt and saving the best for last.  
  
Imogen watched and listened with uncharacteristic indolence, reclined against the headboard with the Morgenstern girl sprawled out next to her. The girl’s unnaturally pale skin made an impossibly long line in Imogen’s sheets, her shock of white hair sticking up from where her face was buried in the pillows. The poor thing was all skinny arms and legs, belying strength and a particular lethality. The tip of Imogen’s finger was trailing over one boney shoulder, and she occasionally graced the sleeping girl with an indulgent smile.  
  
Victor knew he could be a jealous, petty man, but he tamped down on it with effort. If Imogen wanted to fuck a girl nearly half his age, far be it from to stop her. On the bed, Jon stirred, stretching with an open-mouthed yawn like a graceless teenager. In a flurry of wiggling she re-arranged herself on the bed, looking up at him with button-black eyes. A normal person would have said something, Victor thought. Jon said nothing, looking him over.  
  
Not to be outdone, he looked over the small swell of her breasts, the hipbones that jutted out between  the white expanse of her stomach and the coarse hair between her legs. Privately, he thought she looked like some kind of wild, uncivilized woodland creature. Victor prided himself on being meticulous in his grooming; Jon looked like she hadn’t had any sort of contact with a razor or hairbrush in the last five years. If he were in charge of her, by the Angel he would teach her some manners.  
  
“Thank you, Victor,” Imogen said, gracing him with one of her cool smiles. There was a knowing glint in her eyes and a bemused curl to her lips as she ran a hand through Jon’s chopped-short hair. She knew—of course she knew. Certain parts of Victor she could read like one of New York’s billboards, and she wasn’t entirely above doing things to get a rise out of him. She rose in an easy motion, drawing herself upright, not a curl out of place. The white silk of her bathrobe shifted and she gestured to the bed. “Join us.”  
  
As he approached, Jon made a weak effort to make room. There was a hazy, faraway look in her depthless eyes—clearly, Imogen had managed to exhaust even her youthful sexual exuberance. Victor couldn’t help but be grateful. There was something uniquely annoying about someone who had a refractory period under five minutes. In his opinion, giving her anything but fingers after her third orgasm was just encouraging greedy behavior.  
  
Jon shimmied her hips sideways towards Imogen, rolling over onto her side and sleepily grabbing an armful of the covers. Victor slipped into bed next to her, leaning on his elbow. She was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, her close-cropped hair sticking together in metallic strands, white lashes catching the afternoon light. Outside, the grounds to the Herondale mansion stretched out green and luscious. A faint breeze tickled his skin and rustled the white linen curtains. There was a tea tray on the bedside, the earthy smell of Earl Grey, and an unfinished breakfast of eggs and toast.  
  
Fishing for Imogen’s gaze, Victor cupped a hand around the back of Jon’s thigh, pulling it upwards, lazily. Badly-healed scars wrapped around her narrow back, interrupting smooth skin. Jon made a breathless noise as his fingers trailed over them—they seemed sensitive. In the back of his mind, his long-expired medic’s training searched for an explanation. Demon wounds? They seemed far too regular for that.  
  
Keeping his eyes trained upwards to catch Imogen’s eye, Victor leaned in to press a kiss to the junction of Jon’s shoulder and neck, over her _swift_ rune. Her skin was warm, and she smelled of _adamas_ and leather, intermingled with the elegant, familiar scent of Imogen’s perfume. He had Imogen’s attention now, her grey eyes locking with his own as he wrapped an arm around Jon’s hip, pressing his fingers deliberately against her clit.  
  
 _That_ got Jon’s attention, her dark eyes flying open and whipcord muscles tensing. Victor rubbed her in slow, hard circles, feeling the swollen, sensitive nub, teasing the skin of her neck with his teeth. She grabbed his arm and held onto it, her pink, chapped lips falling open in a wordless sigh, her head falling back into the crook of his shoulder. He teased the tip of his tongue over the sensitive skin under her ear, and was amused to hear her gasp. He supposed the youthful inexperience did have its perks.   
  
Inexperience not to be confused with innocence. Jon loved sex the way only people her age could love it—with a furious, clumsy vengeance. Variety and finesse still evaded her, which occasionally made the activity rewarding. Catching her by surprise and drawing a gasp of true wonderment was still easy.   
  
Jon squirmed and arched against him, the powerful muscles of her legs going taut. Her blunt nails dug into the back of his hand, and she was breathing hard, chest rising and falling in an erratic rhythm. Her climax was sudden and relatively shallow. They must have been at this a long time—usually Jon didn’t come that quickly unless someone had a hand around her throat. She gasped in blind abandon for a few seconds before going slack against Victor’s chest, evidently spent.  
  
Imogen lifted her teacup to her lips and took a sip, then gave her new protégé an indulgent smile. If their little show had affected her at all, she did not show it. She reached down to touch the girl’s chin, tilting her face upwards. “Say thank you.”  
  
Jon looked up Victor’s way, curiously, as if seeing him anew. Her dark eyes searched his face for a moment before she said, her voice rough, “Thanks.” She stifled a yawn, poorly, pink lips stretching into a wide _O_ , then added, “Your beard is scratchy.”  
  
Victor felt his lips press together, somewhere between a smile and a frown. “My deepest sympathies.”  
  
Jon ignored the snide comment, looking to Imogen for wordless affirmation. Imogen gave it, plucking a piece of fruit—a chunk of pineapple—from the silver-wrought breakfast tray and putting it to the girl’s lips. Jon ate, like a fed pet, looking up at her benefactor in  starry wonderment. There was a time Victor had been like her, in her place, hanging on to every word and stray look, every quirk of those thin, steely lips. Had kissed and wanted so desperately, with such youthful impudence.  
  
He was not jealous. He was beyond those things now. He was Imogen’s partner, albeit a junior one, no longer just a plaything. Imogen did not put aside her toys like a careless child—she tended them like pets, brought them up and pruned them with careful trim in exactly the shape she wanted. An elite cadre of hand-painted toy soldiers.  
  
Still, he had never seen Imogen eat in bed. Always hated the mess, the crumbs. Jon had revitalized something in her, given her a project, a puzzle to solve. After Stephen’s death she’d been inconsolable, and it had been years until she’d taken Victor in, began to let the grief unfurl. Now, it seemed, after Valentine’s death she’d done the same again. The loss of an old foe had shaken her—she hid it well, but Victor knew. Sometimes, spitefully, he wondered if she was fucking the man’s daughter as an act of revenge. But at the heart of it Victor knew it was the opposite. That if she could fix some of Valentine’s mistakes, perhaps it would make up for some of her own.  
  
He couldn’t think of many times he’d seen Imogen afraid, but with Jace she was paralyzed. A darker, sadder, stronger version of his father, tempered with his mother’s mismatched eyes, as if he had two souls. Did she fear repeating the same tired mistakes that had driven Stephen away, or was she afraid that the grief and the cold core of hate she’d clung to for so long might melt away if she let the boy in?  
  
Victor had no answers. But in Imogen’s eyes Jon was the key, the strange, misbehaved runaway experiment that could solve whatever Gordian knot she’d tied herself into.  
  
They lay there in bed for a few languid, sunlit hours, Imogen touching Jon’s hair and feeding the girl cut up slices of pineapple as Victor read aloud to them. The book at Imogen’s bedside was _Moby Dick_ and he could not help but think of Jon’s translucent silver locks and milky skin as he read aloud about Ahab’s mad hunt for the white whale, Imogen the vengeance-bent captain of the treacherous seas. Soon enough he had the girl’s attention, her black button eyes fixed on him as he turned each page, her long body turned his way, as if he were charming a snake. Imogen’s attention followed hers, a smile touching her lips. She loved to be read to—she had once famously read the entirety of the massive Herondale library to Stephen when he was a boy. Victor imagined that had to be lonely—reading to an infant, a nameless wife alone in an empty mansion’s library. Now she was neither wife, mother, nor nameless—the Herondale throne was hers, and hers alone.  
  
Once his voice had given out and he apologized to be able to go no further, Imogen’s hand found his, cool and smooth. “Thank you, Victor,” she said in her graceful voice, and there it was again, that fluttering deep in his stomach he’d thought he’d lost years ago. How could something as innocent as a touch of the fingertips thrill when they’d explored the most intimate places and parts of each other? Perhaps that was Imogen’s genius. All that time spent panting after sex and when what anyone wanted from her was her approval.  
  
That approval, Victor had learned, was very hard-won. Jon would learn that in time, once the phase of licking her food off Imogen’s fingers passed.  
  
Still, something akin to glowing _satisfaction_ suffused him as he pleasured her, applying the perfect pressure with his tongue in easy, slow strokes. He’d mastered this, how to bring her pleasure, and it pleased him to hear her soft sighs, feel her thighs tighten against him. It eased the knots in his chest and in his head, gave voice to the crowing, slightly pathetic thing inside him that said Jon couldn’t do this—too clumsy, inept. No subterfuge of kisses to her inner thighs, no looking up through the lashes as if to say watch me. Not too efficient, not too drawn out; he’d mastered that curve of pleasure and reveled in its execution.  
  
Jon met him with eager kisses when he’d finished, licking up Imogen’s juices. She felt light to the touch, as if her ribs were hollowed like a bird’s. Victor touched the scars on her back, lightly, and Jon shuddered and sighed in a strange kind of ecstasy, biting at his lips. Imogen joined them, at last, kissing him; he reciprocated. The familiar brush of her curls against his cheek, the deep rose and musk scent of her perfume, her nails on his chest, all a familiar tide drawing him in. Still, he held back—just that little bit of himself in reserve. He held back even as he settled back into the pillows and let Jon’s hot, pink mouth envelop him, Imogen’s gaze buzzing on his skin. Refusing to give himself completely.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> There's more planned but who knows if I'll ever finish it. Thanks for reading!


End file.
